The set included the Carina Nebula's "Cosmic Cliffs", the Southern Ring Nebula, Stephan's Quintet of galaxies and a spectrum of the giant exoplanet WASP-96b showing water vapour. The previous evening, President Joe Biden had unveiled a deep-field image of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, whose gravity bends light from galaxies behind it. Built by NASA with the European and Canadian space agencies, Webb launched in December 2021 and observes in infrared from 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.
Webb took more than two decades to build and cost about $10 billion. Its 6.5-meter mirror, made of 18 gold-coated hexagonal segments, is too large to fit in a rocket, so it launched folded and opened in space. A sunshield the size of a tennis court keeps its instruments cold enough to detect faint infrared light. The unfolding, completed in January 2022, involved hundreds of mechanisms that each had to work.
On July 11, 2022, Biden unveiled the first image at the White House: Webb's First Deep Field, which shows thousands of galaxies in a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. It took about 12.5 hours of exposure.
The following day, NASA released the rest at the Goddard Space Flight Center. The images of the Carina Nebula showed newborn stars in a landscape of gas and dust, and Stephan's Quintet revealed interacting galaxies in detail never seen before. Within weeks astronomers were reporting galaxies that appeared to have formed earlier than models predicted.
Key people: Bill Nelson, Joe Biden